Resume Who Needs It

During the past five or so years, LinkedIn has become a force majeure in the recruitment and job-search space. Thousands of recruiters and hiring managers are now searching for candidates on LinkedIn and reaching out them to recruit. As a result many job seekers and even others not looking for a job have relegated the traditional rsum to the scrap pile.

This is a mistake!

Why? This is primarily because a LinkedIn Profile and rsum convey a candidate"s value proposition in very different ways. Granted, that LinkedIn provides searchable database to quickly narrow one"s search and come up with potential candidates for a job. Also, the fact that they are visible and well presented on LinkedIn implicitly conveys their willingness to change jobs. So, the effort required to target a hirable candidate is much more efficient using this approach. However, this is not the whole story!

A well-crafted rsum can be a good foundation for creating a strong LinkedIn Profile. A recruiter or hiring manager sees a typical searched Profile for about 8 seconds. This requires that the presentation of your message be done to allow this time to convey your value to the reader (recruiter or hiring manager) to get that call. A well-designed rsum can complement this presentation, once you get selected to move forward. When you are in front of an interviewer a strongly showcased rsum can be a powerful tool for the interviewer to see and use to explore further your candidacy, much more effectively than your LinkedIn Profile.

So, here are my reasons for not abandoning your rsum in favor of a LinkedIn Profile:

Most professionals create their rsum only when they need to look for a job. This is a mistake. A rsum can be used to manage your career by carefully selecting the assignments and pre-writing your accomplishments to achieve what you set out to achieve. It can serve as a roadmap to your career arc and future plans.

For making a job or career change a forward-looking rsum is critical. Historical chronology cannot provide that leap of faith for a reader to take risk on a candidate because it does not showcase what that candidate can do in a new direction. An Inductive rsum (my own creation and IP) can do this much more effectively.

A well-designed rsum allows for very efficient formatting and layout (including fonts, colors, highlights, and tables) that LinkedIn does not. So, when you take your rsum to your job interview it is much more efficient to conduct an interview using this document than a printed version of your LI Profile.

LinkedIn Profile allows for only one major avatar of your career. So, if you want to showcase yourself as a software engineer, program manager, and a customer-support person it is difficult to have each one of those focused value propositions in your LinkedIn Profile without diluting your brand. A rsum can be optimized for each targeted job easily.

You can showcase a more personal statement in a rsum, which is difficult on a LinkedIn Profile.

Since each update of a Profile can trigger its notification to others in your network, doing a discreet job search is much more difficult using LinkedIn.

These are just some of the reasons for not abandoning your rsum in preference to a LinkedIn Profile. I am sure that there are also other reasons for doing so or otherwise. So, use your judgment in keeping yourself marketable.

Good luck!

About Author

Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation.

After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control.

During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership.

Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life.

Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions.

Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand.

Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader.

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